My husband sometimes has a hard time waking up in the mornings. To be honest I sleep through his shower, so I suppose I have a harder time getting up. But early in the marriage it was important for us to share our mornings (like every other moment of our day) so we would get up together, I would pack lunches and get breakfast together while Jacob got ready for work.

Things haven’t changed much, except that we really tired of boxed cereal. So we tried other things like eggs, oatmeal, bagels, and muffins. I think we really like the convenience aspect of the latter two. Jacob can grab his lunch and breakfast and eat them on his way or when he gets to work. Yes we loose a bit of together time in the mornings but we agree that we get more out of our evenings together and if he leaves early he can get home earlier.

Back in August, when we were road-tripping through Pennsylvania we picked up a giant muffin tin. It makes 6 muffins. This doesn’t quite get us through the week but we don’t want to eat the same thing everyday anyway. Be warned these muffins are more than one meal. They are huge and we both usually break up our breakfast muffin into a 6:30 am meal and a 9:30ish snack.

We are still experimenting with recipes, they don’t all translate well from regular muffin size to giant size. I think more structure (i.e. dry ingredients like flour and oats) and additional leavening (baking powder etc) are necessary.

We have tried a variety of recipes but haven’t had much luck. This week we made some chocolate chip muffins. They were really good! So here’s the recipe.

Ingredients:

3 cups bleached all-purpose flour (I never use straight white flour)

2¾ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips (this was way too many!)

12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, softened

½ cup granulated sugar

½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar

2½ teaspoons vanilla extract

3 large eggs

1 cup milk

Directions:

Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a small bowl. (Feel free to go wild with your 3 cups. I keep oats, wheat bran, wheat flour, and flax around and I am never shy to substitute parts of the flour amount with any of these. I think this time I used about 2/3 a cups of wheat bran with a few table spoons of flax. This always gives body and flavor to the baked good)

Toss the chocolate chips with a tablespoon of the dry ingredients. I have no idea what this does but Jacob liked the results (not that we have anything to compare to, I forgot to run a control experiment). Remember to cut the chocolate if this is not a treat but a meal, 1/3 cup of chocolate per muffin is quite a lot!

Mix the sugar and butter, by hand or mixer. Add the vanilla extract and add the eggs one at a time. Whip or beat until well mixed.

Alternately add the dry ingredients and milk. 3 additions of the former and 2 of the latter (i.e. dry, milk, dry, milk, dry). This mixes everything consistently. And remember to scrape those sides.

Finally, toss in the chocolate.

Evenly distribute batter into lined muffin tin.

Bake the muffins at 375˚F for 30 minutes, or until risen, set and a toothpick inserted into the center of each muffin withdraws clean. It’ll be hard to tell with all the chocolate but look for gooey light colored stuff and ignore the dark.